


calling me home

by villanelle



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Game of Thrones Fusion, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 18:17:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2591429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/villanelle/pseuds/villanelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A girl from the North and her Braavosi dancing master, crossing blades while trying to find somewhere they belong. </p><p>(ASoIaF + SNK crossover)</p>
            </blockquote>





	calling me home

  
In the North, people stared, but her coloring and her features were not  _that_ different from theirs, and with time, she became simply another member of House Jaeger, albeit an adopted one.  _The foundling wolf_ , the servants called her, their voices low so that Lord Grisha and his lady wife would not hear.

In the South though, in the winding streets of King’s Landing, people’s eyes lingered, some harmlessly curious and others  _appraising_.

“Cover your hair, sweetling,” Lord Grisha murmured to her, and she pulled the red woolen scarf, which her adoptive brother had given to her, over her hair that was darker than even a Baratheon’s.

Neither she nor Eren found court to be as entertaining as their parents had described, but her brother at least was permitted to run outside the castle with other noblemen’s sons. Within a week, he had already made a friend.

“A Lannister?” she repeated doubtfully.

“Well yes, but Armin’s not like the rest of his family,” Eren said confidently. “He wants to become a maester at the Citadel one day, and he’s more clever than anyone else I’ve met in King’s Landing so far. He doesn’t seem like much of a lion though. They say his sister is much more fearsome than him.”

She nodded, silently agreeing. She didn’t particularly like Annie, but she’d been forced to keep company with the girl and a handful of other highborn young ladies, which translated into hours of mindlessly dull needlework that made her fingers ache. What she sensed though was that Annie was like her, and one day, she found herself joining the Lannister girl at a window overlooking the courtyard where the boys played.

“It’s not fair, is it?” Annie said, her blue eyes following Armin’s motions. “I would wear the armor better than he does.”

Mikasa said nothing, but her fingers on the window-frame itched.

 

* * *

 

Her name didn’t sound like anyone else’s, not in the North or the South.

Lord Grisha showed her a map of the known world once, let her trace a small finger across the aged yellow parchment while sounding out the names in a childish lisp.

“Here we are, in the North of Westeros,” he told her. “And here, across the Narrow Sea, are the nine Free Cities. Braavos, the youngest and greatest. Lorath, its smaller and poorer sister by comparison.”

Mikasa’s fingers roamed a little farther to a jagged triangle of blue, to a word that made her veins awash with ice even when wrapped in furs. “Slaver’s Bay. Is that where I came from, before coming here?”

“No, my child,” Grisha said firmly. While some lords turned a blind eye to the practice that was forbidden by law, it was well-known that Lord Jaeger abhorred slavery and would not hesitate to place his sword on the neck of those caught engaging in it. He had in fact done so to the men who had tried to sell her mother and her. Alerted by his son to the strange house on the outskirts of a town they’d been passing through, he had arrived in time to save the daughter but not the mother.

“Then where do I come from?”

Her foster parent did not respond for a long moment. At last, he admitted, “I have no complete answer to give to you. The maesters have suggested that your origins lie in Essos, perhaps in Yi Ti or the island of Leng. I’ve thought to myself sometimes that this map is incomplete, and perhaps you came to us from even further beyond the Jade Sea.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Grisha assured her. “We regard you as one of our own.”

And that year, he made good on his word, carefully placing a direwolf pup in both her arms and Eren’s.

In the years following, Mikasa repeated those words to herself quite often. Whenever she visited a sept though, she cut a path not to the Maiden or the Mother as other girls tended to do. Instead, she lit her candles at the altar of the Stranger.

 

* * *

 

Her true nameday was unknown, and so she shared that of her brother’s. On their sixteenth, Mikasa watched as Eren marveled over his beautifully crafted gift, a training sword from the finest smith in King’s Landing. She knew his ambitions for knighthood well and regarded with dread her brother’s approaching future as a squire.

When it came time for her own gift however, Grisha and Carla explained apologetically that it was delayed but that she should show up at the Small Hall on the next day to receive it.

“But what will Mikasa be receiving?” Eren demanded.

“Dancing lessons,” his parents replied, which made him quickly lose interest.

Mikasa did not look forward to it with any great anticipation either, and the following morning, she found herself late in arriving at the Small Hall, which appeared to her eyes empty at first.

“Do they not teach highborn brats how to tell time?”

She whirled, and there was a man standing there, having emerged from the shadows which seemed to linger under his eyes. He was shorter than her but carried himself as if he were taller, and Mikasa straightened her back, for once as conscious of her posture as her septa normally was. The man’s simple black tunic fit tightly to his frame, and she would’ve thought of him as slight if it were not for his strong neck and the defined forearms that hinted at more muscle.

“You don’t look like a dancing master,” she remarked to him.

“And you don’t look like a Northerner,” he retorted.

Stung, Mikasa clenched her fists. “I’m Lord Jaeger’s ward. Which is probably more than you can say for yourself. Who in seven hells are you?”

He sighed, muttered something that sounded like “temperamental”, and then introduced himself in a louder voice, “The name’s Levi. And maybe I wasn’t nursed by a wolf, but I spent eight years as the First Sword of Braavos, which means I’m the one who actually knows how to use a blade here.”

He was holding two wooden swords in his hands, the sort of training foil that her brother and the other boys practiced with sometimes. Hefting one, he tossed it to her, and Mikasa managed to clap both hands around the middle of the shaft.

“You idiot. Catch a real sword like that, and you’ll slice your pretty little white hands right through.”

“How would I know?” she snarled, moving her right hand to the carved wooden hilt. “The only times I’ve held a sword is when my brother was in the mood to share one with me.”

Levi was quiet for a moment, studying with narrowed eyes the way she held the weapon.

“Not completely hopeless,” he said. “But during those rare occasions of swordplay with your brother, you often beat him, didn’t you? Or so, my employer has told me.”

She looked down at the angled blade, remembering how Eren had preferred to spar with the older boys as he himself reached adolescence. “Lord Grisha hired you?”

“Indeed. Apparently, I’ve been commanded to teach you some of the basic steps and save the other young ladies from your deadly needlework.”

Mikasa nodded and slid into a stance, left leg in a stable diagonal, right leg bent not quite ninety degrees. “I think I can manage a little more than just the basic steps.”

Her dancing master’s face showed its first hint of emotion: a gleam of anticipation in his dark eyes. He shifted his feet into his own stance, and it looked odd, different from how the fencers she’d seen distributed their balance.

Frowning and staring at his boots, she blurted out, “Are you sure you know how to —”

His sword lashed forward and knocked hers to the ground, bouncing a few feet away. Her hand smarted from the impact.

“Pick it up, little wolf. And from here on out, I’ll be the one who decides what are the  _basic_  steps.”

 

* * *

 

Her lessons were infrequent and irregularly spaced, resulting in Levi swearing at her in a slightly toned down manner whenever she showed up in the Small Hall.

“Lazy, lazy….lazy,” he sneered, circling her and lunging when she misjudged a distance and came too close. His sword hit thrice, once on her blade and twice on the meat of her arm.

“You’d be gushing your bloody way to a terrific death right now if that had been real steel in my hands.”

Mikasa bit her lip and sprung forward while the man was still in mid-speech. With a disdainful heavy-lidded glance, Levi shifted marginally to the side, yanking her in a downwards arc. She dropped her sword to land with both hands planted on the ground, a burst of pain traveling from palms to wrist and higher up nerves. As she got back up on her feet, she realized her neck was bare.

Levi was holding her scarf, unwinding its length and running the fabric through his hands with cat-like curiosity. Her vision went red as he sniffed at it, recoiling with exaggerated motion.

“And here I thought a Northern lady would smell better than those from the South,” he teased as she seized it back from him. “Do you never wash that thing?”

Burying her still-aching hands in the comforting wool, she said defensively, “It’s a keepsake from my brother.”

“Ah, are you sure you belong to House Jaeger? Perhaps, we should rename you a Targaryen.”

Blushing furiously, Mikasa turned her head away and went to pick up her sword.

Casually inspecting his own blade for invisible dents, Levi continued, “A keepsake? Is your brother dead or something? I thought Lord Jaeger had two healthy brats.”

“No! He’s perfectly alive and well.” She re-wrapped the scarf around her neck, taking care to stuff the long tasseled ends into the loosened neckline of the boy’s shirt she wore, another item poached from her brother’s wardrobe. “It’s just….a keepsake from the night he and his father saved me.”

“Saved you?”

When she didn’t answer, he took two quick steps forward and placed a finger at the inside of her wrist. Startled, she looked at him. It wasn’t that Levi never touched her. He was constantly correcting her stances and her footwork with a firm hand. But this — this was gentle, a barely perceptible contact of his callused skin to a place where she wasn’t soft either.

He ran his finger down one of the raised diagonals on that scarred patch of skin and said in a voice that sounded distant, “In Braavos, we do not trade with Slaver’s Bay, but I’ve made my way down to Volantis where they’ve enriched themselves on human flesh. Sometimes, I came across slaves that were tattooed on every inch from navel to scalp. But the ones that those pig merchants reserved, for the pleasure houses of Lys, were never marked in such a fashion. No blemish on the goods except for something small, on the wrist or the back of the neck.”

Mikasa withdrew her hand sharply, as if her flesh were burnt by his words. “I don’t want to talk about that….and you’re not supposed to touch me.”

He stiffened, his lips parting as if to unleash another one of his taunts about highborn sensibilities. Instead, Levi said simply,

“Alright. Now, sword up.”

They recommenced their dance.

 

* * *

 

Levi didn’t touch her again and took to wearing black gloves as if to double the certainty of obeying her instruction. The bruises from his lessons persisted though, despite how she took care in padding her targeted limbs with Eren’s winter woolens. Around the castle, she still wore her Northern dresses, thick grey fabric covering her fully.

“Are you a septa?” mocked one of the Tyrell girls, swirling in a green gown that left much of her back and shoulders bare.

A few weeks later however, there was a summer wedding feast at court, which left her little choice but to wear a Southron dress unless she wanted to faint from heat stroke in front of everyone. Carla brushed her hair so that it fell down her back, a smooth, gleaming river, black and lustrous like polished obsidian. The gown was a loose silk the color of plum wine, affixed to a jeweled collar around her neck to drape down the line of her back as well as her front.

Eren entered the room as they were finishing up and teased from the doorway, “Are you sure you’re not the one getting married?”

As he came closer though, a furrow sunk into his brow, and he said with concern, “Are all these bruises from your dance lessons?”

Carla and Mikasa traded glances in the silvered mirror, and his mother said calmly, “Mikasa hasn’t been learning the conventional dances, dear.”

Eren looked to his sister for explanation. Grabbing a jar of cosmetic, Mikasa dipped her fingers into the cream and began to smear pinches of it over the bruises.

“I have been learning how to dance,” she told him honestly. “It just happens to be the Braavosi Water Dance, which involves a sword.”

Her brother’s jaw gaped open. “So your dance master is a Braavosi swordsman?” Groaning to the two women, he complained, “That sounds much better than my suffering with Shadis Martell. The man is an absolute sadist. I think he hates everyone who isn’t from Dorne.”

Mikasa laughed and stood up to link arms with him. “I’m sorry, but you just saw my bruises, didn’t you? I don’t think you could really deem my experience that much better.”

Brother and sister headed together to the castle’s outer yard where the feast and revelry had been installed, fools and jesters running about in their colorful motley. The tables were piled high with plates fresh and steaming from the kitchens, ranging from a spit-roasted wild boar to the traditional pigeon pie. On the highest raised dais sat members of the current ruling family, House Reiss, and Mikasa saw Rodrick Reiss leaning out of his seat to pluck at a pretty maid’s bottom as she passed by with a flirtatious giggle. The surrounding tables were laid out under the banners of various houses. The siblings stopped by the Lannister table to greet Armin and walked quickly past the colors of Kenneth Bolton, whose sunken gaze always made Mikasa shiver.

She took her seat under the deep pine green banner of House Jaeger and endured the feast without much enjoyment, uncomfortable with how much of her flesh was on display. Looking around her though, she noticed that the girls around her age were all garbed similarly. Mikasa was only a couple of months away from her seventeenth nameday now, and she wasn’t unaware that at court, marriage was much like a market.

One of the Tyrell sons approached her for a dance, sweetly complimenting her hair. Eren, who apparently recognized him, immediately jutted his own dark head forward and said unkindly, “You want to kiss up to my ‘silken locks’ too, Jean?”

His mother pulled him back by the ear and insisted to Mikasa to go on forth.

Holding her skirts carefully, Mikasa let Jean guide her to the floor, settling into a rhythm and looking down at his feet to make sure she had it right.

“You must be one of the best dancers at court,” he said to her abruptly, and she looked up in surprise.

“Oh, why do you say so?”

“Well, I saw you for the first time a while ago, and I kept asking after you, but the other girls always said you were at your dancing lessons.”

Something caught her eye, and she promptly tripped over his feet. “Sorry, do you mind if we move a little over there?”

He whirled her in the direction that she nudged him towards, and Mikasa stared over the slope of his shoulder at the familiar gaze pointed her way. When the dance finished, she thanked the Tyrell boy in a few distracted words and darted away before he could ask for another. Returning to the table that she had spotted earlier, she plopped herself down right next to her dancing master.

“What are you doing here?”

Levi sighed heavily and said with a disapproving mouth, “Some highborn lady you are. Your septa should have beaten you for such manners.”

“What does a Braavosi swordsman know about Westerosi manners?”

“Oh, Levi likes to put up a cultivated front,” said a cheerful voice from his other side. “But his vulgar mouth always ruins it.”

The brown-tressed person held out a hand and introduced themself. “Hange, maester at the Citadel. You must be the student this one here has been raving about.”

Bewildered, Mikasa glanced at Levi’s face, which revealed nothing, and said, “That probably isn’t me.”

With a wicked grin, the maester stood up, shaking out their robes a little before saying, “I’ll leave you two to have a lesson in conversation then. The tongue can also play at being a blade, hmm?”

As they walked away, Mikasa shifted awkwardly in her seat, unsure of what to say to the man without a sword in her hand.

He spoke first instead. “You still don’t look like a Northerner.” Turning slightly, he studied her, waist to scalp, in a way that made her feel warmly ruddy in the cheeks. “You don’t look like you at all. But I suppose they’ve dressed you up for a purpose. Have you ensnared a future lord husband yet?”

She thought briefly of the Tyrell boy but replied, “No, I haven’t ensnared anyone.”

“Tch, I’ll wager that you’re wrong there.” Levi stood and held out a hand. “Do you want to dance?”

He turned out to be much better at it than she was, just like in the realm of swordplay. But she liked this better, considering that there was no wooden stick swatting at her sides. Levi still circled her as if they were dueling though, and she rotated in a slower swish of purple skirts, unable to look away from his profile angled towards her.

“Keep your arms fluid,” Levi instructed. She mirrored him, curving her arms in graceful arcs until he caught her hand and lifted their joined fingers, bringing her so close that for one moment, her lips tingled from their mingling breath.

It had been weeks since they last touched, since she last allowed him to touch her.

The music changed, and Mikasa saw that more people were gathering on the floor for a linked formation dance. Suddenly, she felt that she did not want to share him, not right now.

She thought of what other girls whispered about when their septas could not hear them.

“Would you like to come to the Small Hall with me?”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “You’re in the mood for a spar?”

She reached for his hand and linked a finger, briefly, with his. “Yes, for a spar.”

He followed her wordlessly until they were both standing on the familiar ground of the Small Hall where they could no longer hear the drunken cacophony of the feast. The sky’s fading illumination filtering in between the stone pillars cast a latticed pattern of light and shadow on the floor. Mikasa pulled him to one of the stripes of shadow and then placed her lips on his in imitation of what she’d seen others do in secret corners.

Levi pulled back, but his eyes rested on her mouth. “The tongue is a blade,” he said, and he swallowed her questions, the stroke of his tongue warm and wet against hers.

“A cultivated front,” she whispered when he finally allowed her to breathe. Pressing against him so that the swells of her breasts rubbed with noticeably hardened peaks through her gown, she demanded, “Now show me how vulgar your mouth can be.”

There were many things that a highborn lady wasn’t supposed to do, but Mikasa thought to herself later that she had reached the epitome of that list when she allowed her dancing master to strip the silk from her and lie her down on it so that they could ruin it together.

 

* * *

 

Soon after her seventeenth nameday, her lessons in the Small Hall were formally discontinued, her foster parents having decided that it was time to put away childish things.

Mikasa didn’t issue a word of protest. Instead, she convinced the Tyrell girls that she wanted to join their visits outside the castle to the streets of King’s Landing.  After accompanying them to a few markets and shops, she took to slipping away, covering her hair and making sure that the knife at her belt was hidden and secure.

Levi never seemed to trust her with getting very far by herself. He was supposed to wait for her in front of a shop along Coppersmith’s Wynd, but he always found her before that.

“It’s not so dangerous,” Mikasa commented, not so much in protest but more because she often found herself naturally inclined to argue with him. “The Tyrell girls come out here every other week.”

“And when they do, they’re trailed by half a dozen guardsmen as well as ten gold cloaks.”

“Yes, but I can manage myself,” she continued. “ _You_  trained me.”

“In one skillset,” Levi rejoined. “I could’ve swiped from your purse several times as you were walking down this very street.”

She glanced at him sideways with a mischievous tilt to her lips. “I think we can say that you’ve trained me in more than one skillset by now.”

He said nothing, but she detected a smirk on the mouth she often teased.

Eventually, she grew to know the path to his home quite well. It was a twisting, serpentine journey to reach the small house he lived in, but she tread with anticipation. Every nook and corner of that house was absurdly tidy, but his bedroom never stayed that way for long on her visits. It was she more often than not who pushed him down on the bed, unlacing his breeches with a gradually practiced hand. He reined himself in, entering her with just the blade of his tongue, unwilling to have her risk the need for moon tea.

“You could just spend yourself on me,” she suggested, arching underneath him.

He groaned, rubbed hard against her. “Didn’t your septa teach you what they do after noble weddings?”

“Oh right, they spread my bloody sheets like a banner for everyone to see. How romantic.” She paused, contemplative. “Do you think your fingers already took care of that for me?”

Levi chuckled into the shallow dips at the base of her throat, his warm breath tickling the delicate skin there. She arched again, wet and bare where he was still clothed, and they were dancing once more, their movements rhythmic and ancient.

 

* * *

 

“Betrothed?”

“Yes, I to Annie of House Lannister, and you to Jean,” her brother told her. “Father’s planning to announce it any day now.”

They were in Lord Grisha’s solar, tucked amidst dusty scrolls and heavy tomes that she knew Armin would appreciate.

Mikasa traced the spine of one  _Histories of Old Valyria_  before getting past the stone in her stomach to ask her brother, “Well, you’re not…unhappy about that, are you? About it being Annie?”

Eren didn’t seem to know how to respond. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I just feel like there are other things I should do first before marrying anyone.”

“Anyway,” he continued. “I’m more worried about you. I mean, I think I can delay if I want to, but the Tyrells have been pressing Father about it rather strongly recently.”

“Jean’s not unkind,” Mikasa began softly.

“Yes, but he’s the sixth son!” Eren cut in. “He won’t inherit anything after his brothers. And….there are whispers about him and the Baratheon boy.”

“Oh,” was all she could say, wondering if she would make Jean unhappy after all.

“There are whispers about a lot of people,” Eren added, looking straight at her, and she tilted her face away, thinking of a house tucked deep in the marrow of King’s Landing.

Later that day, Lord Grisha pulled her aside and told her that any proceeding betrothal would only take place with her agreement and that they would not force her in any way. Her adoptive father did emphasize however that the Tyrell match was not a bad one.

The matriarch of House Tyrell spoke much more bluntly a few days afterward at a garden lunch of cheese and lemon cakes.

“Quite frankly, dear,” the old woman said to Mikasa. “You’re Lord Jaeger’s ward, not his daughter by blood, and it’s blood that rules lineage in Westeros. You should consider yourself fortunate to receive such a proposal at all. Furthermore, most girls would be leaping at the chance to make a home at Highgarden. It’s a much better climate than anywhere else in the seven kingdoms.”

Mikasa nodded politely and went to bed that night with her direwolf warming her side. Both girl and wolf fell asleep in mutual harmony, dreaming of the snow-draped hills in the North.

 

* * *

 

Levi never allowed her to see his chest bare. She snuck her hands under his shirt once or twice, but he stopped her roaming very early on, firmly set against the matter.

The day before she was due to respond to the Tyrells’ offer, Mikasa left the Red Keep by herself and flitted down the labyrinth of streets, surprising Levi at his door with three sharp knocks.

“Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready to move to Highgarden?” he demanded, blocking a surprisingly large amount of the doorway.

She managed to peek past his shoulder, at the room that looked as clean as usual but also mostly empty. Levi didn’t own many possessions, but there were things she recognized that were missing.

“Are you…leaving King’s Landing?”

He looked at her, unflinching. “Yes. A friend of mine has recently become Lord Commander at the Wall. I’ve decided that I’ll be heading there myself, to take the black.”

The Night’s Watch. Where men swore an oath to hold neither land nor possessions, wear no crown, win no glory, and take no wife.

Mikasa reached for his hand and twined her slim finger around his thicker one. “One last lesson?”

They went upstairs to his room, and after she pushed him down to the bed that still remained, she rested her hands on his clothed abdomen.

“Could I see you? Fully? Just this once.”

 _Since it may be the last_  remained unspoken.

Levi acquiesced and sat up. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it to the side rather carelessly, but she could see how tightly he was holding himself around the shoulders and arms. His torso was tattooed, every inch of it stitched with ink, some areas messily filled in like her embroidery, others bearing more resemblance to the art of calligraphy. They started at below his collarbone, ran past his sternum, and ended thinly at tendrils whispering along the sharp cut of his pelvis.

And his back…well, Mikasa could pick out that it had been a tattooed landscape once as well, but most of it was overtaken by scars. The longest ones, jagged diagonals, derived from whips, she knew. The smaller ones she could only guess at, and maybe she could eventually draw out their stories from him, but that would take time which they didn’t have.

“Were you a slave?” Mikasa asked in the quiet hush of his room.

“Something like one,” Levi answered, and the shadows under his eyes were more pronounced than ever. “Sometimes even less than a slave when my body was too weak to work.”

She couldn’t imagine him ever weakened to such a point.

Mikasa coaxed him to lie underneath her again, but his muscles were tense and his fingers gripped almost too hard at her hips. Leaning down, she pressed her mouth to the mark over his scapula, brushing the faint tracery of  _buzdari_ with warm moisture. Her hair was a cool sweep of silk over his skin as she moved further down, memorizing his body’s map of words and flicking her tongue to learn the languages written.  _Egros_ in High Valyrian was on the swell of his bicep,  _skagos_ in the Old Tongue was inked over his heart. Valyrian, she remembered a maester telling her once, was spoken with liquid sounds, and so Mikasa moved like soothing water over him, leaving shimmering trails of worship in her wake.

She did not forget his back either. When he turned over at her request, she slowly tasted the topography of ruined and healed skin there as well, licking the scars that were raised and suckling the ones that were flat or sunken.

His body was thrumming like the sun, whose radiance wavered on the darkening horizon by the time she finished, and Levi impatiently flipped her so that her breasts slid against his chest. His mouth was on hers for a long time and then wetly tasting her nipples through her smallclothes before sinking down to draw out ecstasy from the swollen lips of her quim.

“I could kiss you here forever,” he said, his rough fingers holding her apart so that he could see her lush flesh red and wanting. “Sate myself like a starving man on the juices of a highborn.”

Mikasa wanted to swear at him and laugh for his use of such a vulgar tongue, but her hips were demanding that she ride out her pleasure, and so she did, coming to a shuddering end against him.

Resting her head on the shelf of his shoulder as their bodies cooled, she traced idly over his tattoos again and asked, “In the cities across the narrow sea, did you ever come across anyone — who looked like me?”

“Once or twice in Essos,” Levi murmured against her hair. “I saw people whose hair was as black as yours, people who were neither Westerosi nor Valyrian.”

He shifted slightly and kissed her damp brow. “But someone like you….I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone else like you.”

Later, Levi brought her as close to home as he could, saying a curt goodbye at the torch-lit gates of the Red Keep. When she ascended the castle steps to the quarters that the Jaegers held, Mikasa saw her brother waiting for her, half-asleep.

He awoke fully as she touched his shoulder, and his cypress-green eyes were darkened with concern. “I thought your dancing lessons were over.”

She sat down and leaned against him. “I thought so too.”

_But some things are hard to end._

 

* * *

 

When the end of autumn arrived upon them weeks later, Mikasa found herself much unchanged, still restless at court, still very much unmarried.

 _Winter is coming_ , murmured the few Northerners remaining in the castle, and there were other whispers too of something coming with it.

Nothing was supposed to exist beyond the Wall, nothing but miles of barren hinterland and a few tribes of wildlings who somehow managed to live off of them. But by autumn, the ravens that the Lord Commander had repeatedly sent were no longer ignored, and many of the boys in her brother’s circle were changing their future plans from knighthood to a much less glorified service.

“I’m going back North,” Eren told her with Lord Grisha’s old Valyrian broadsword placed on his lap. “To take the black with the Night’s Watch.”

Beside him, Armin, young and brilliant and already having garnered a maester’s link of silver, nodded that he was going as well. And Jean too announced that he was following his freckled Baratheon friend to the Wall, though he was already cursing at how cold the North would be.

Listening to the boys talk, their voices tangled with excitement and nervousness, Mikasa thought of the snow she hadn’t seen for over two years, of the vast incomparable beauty of the wild North, and of a man whose blade was faster than that of anyone else she knew.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> buzdari: "slave" in High Valyrian  
> egros: "sword"  
> skagos: "stone" in the Old Tongue
> 
>  
> 
> Art by the lovely, wonderful oliviamika: http://oliviamika.tumblr.com/post/117852467158/my-pictures-for-rivamika-fanfiction-calling-me


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